No articles for week of February 01, 2005

PHP 5.0.3 installed

IP address change

It's been a long while (like, since June of 2002) since we've been assigned a new IP address. But, we now have a new one. All primary domains *should* be functional, with a few we don't control being switched over as soon as their respective operators get the message.

Apache updates

The Indigo Dragon took the show for awhile while we compiled Apache 1.33, mod_ssl 2.8.22, and OpenSSL 0.9.7e. It's been quite awhile since we've updated Apache and before we did it I wanted to be sure we had a backup server.

Power system revisions

Indigo-Dragon becomes functional backup system

The Indigo-Dragon, after a lot of work, now has a fully functional setup capable of backing up DrQue.net. A lot of work went into compiling/installing all the necessary software, but we now have all the steps covered and results are good. Having a backup server is nice for a number of reasons. We can now shutdown the White-Dragon for hardware updates-- something we just don't do these days.

Record setting October traffic

A 23,105 visitors toatling 478,556 hits, making dwarfing our highest previous record of 260,961 hits ( August of 2004) and 8,153 visitors (March of 2004). Most of the traffic came to the page about my sleeping quarters which was requested by 17,697 visitors-- 79.3% of everyone that showed up.

New router takes over

PHP 5 added to White Dragon

The White Dragon upgrades to PHP 5. After looking at some of the fetchers of PHP 5, we decided we must have it-- and now we do. This compile of PHP 5 also has suport for GD library, which is nice. For anyone that stumbles on this page trying to compile PHP 5 with MySQL, the following must be done: Download MySQL "Libraries and header file" and install them Compile PHP 5 with "--with-mysql=/bin" Life will be good :)

Record breaking hits

We pulled in record hits yesterday. Seems my page about my sleeping quarters is providing endless amounts of amusement, having been linked from at a least two different places (here and here). What kind of traffic are we talking about?

Daily Statistics for October 2004

Day

Hits

Files

Pages

Visits

Sites

KBytes

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

..

9

4166

1.94%

3191

1.65%

405

2.07%

139

1.43%

207

2.09%

522208

2.74%

10

4513

2.10%

3695

1.91%

404

2.06%

162

1.67%

228

2.31%

878114

4.61%

11

5298

2.46%

3734

1.93%

591

3.02%

165

1.70%

265

2.68%

826569

4.34%

12

6756

3.14%

4780

2.47%

497

2.54%

155

1.60%

272

2.75%

995332

5.23%

13

118877

55.31%

111642

57.75%

9654

49.30%

6929

71.43%

7045

71.30%

1974018

10.37%

For a site that normally pulls in about 200,000 hits a month, getting 118,000 in one day is a bit of a jump! At one point during the after noon, 4:00pm, we averaged almost 2 hits/second. Watching the log file, we could saw many times that we were sustaining 3-4 hits/second. I'm pleased, but that's nothing by compassion to sites like slashdot, who I once read averaged about 30 hits/second.

Red-Dragon upgrades again

Having only 750 gigs of drive space just wasn't enough. Pluvius had 2 more 250 gig drives no one had claimed-- so we took them. That puts the RAID-5 array at 1.5 terabytes to total drives space. It configured with 5 drives as the array for a solid terabyte of drive space, and 1 drive as a hot spare. This way, if we loss a drive, the spare takes over and the system hardly losses a beat. All this configuration means drives have moved all over. The Red-Dragon now has 7 hard drives: the 37 gig 10k RPM boot drive and the 6 drives of the RAID-5 called Tera. We moved the 2x 100 GB WD RAID-1 array to the Black Dragon, along with the 120 gig WD (Aux. data). The 60 gig WD ramains orphined. It might move into a Linux box in the near future, but no plans yet. So, my drive array looks like this: